Did you know: Tucows, Hover’s parent company, was one of the primary architects of the domain transfer rules used by every registrar around the world!

The low-down on domain transfers

Transferring your domain name is like switching phone companies. Not happy with your current domain registrar? We’ll move your domain name to a better home and add a year to that domain name registration for as little as $10. In addition, you’ll get to keep all of the existing time left on your domain registration. Not a bad deal! For example, if your domain currently expires on July 3, 2013, after your transfer to Hover, it will expire on July 3, 2014!

Common misconceptions

With some registrars, transferring your domain can be a long process, riddled with fine print and hidden costs. Here are some common misconceptions about domain name transfers, and how Hover makes the process a lot smoother:

It’s extremely costly to transfer.
A domain transfer to Hover costs as little as $10. Included in the cost is one-year’s domain registration, the excellent Hover domain name management tools, no-wait telephone support and Hover’s domain Valet Service. Not too shabby!

You’ll lose the remaining registration time.
You paid for your domain registration, you should be able to keep it! When you decide to transfer your services to Hover, all remaining time left on your current registration will be honored! Please note that you must wait 60 days after you renewed or registered your domain with your current registrar in order to make the switch.

It’s a lot of work.
Transferring your services from one registrar to another can indeed be time consuming. Hover recognizes your time is valuable and that’s why we offer our domain Valet Service. We’ll move one or all of your domains from your current registrar to Hover and let you know when it’s done. To request Hover’s Valet Service, send an email to help@hover.com or give us a call at 1-866-731-6556!

Getting started

It’s easy to transfer your name from GoDaddy, Network Solutions, eNom, 1&1, and other registrars. You can transfer at any time after 60 days of registration, regardless of how long you registered your domain for. Have a look at Hover pricing for current domain transfer prices. We’d love to have you aboard!

So you’ve decided to renew your Hover domain! Congrats! We’re glad to have you.
Renewing your domain with Hover is as simple as it was to register. Simply follow these steps for a no-hassle renewal!

Renew a single domain name….

1. Sign in to your Hover account
2. If you have more than one domain name in your account, click on the domain name that you want to renew. Alternately, you can mouse-over the domain name and click on the Renew link.
3. If you have only one domain name in your account, you will be taken directly to your Domain Details page. Click on the Renew link.
4. Now’s the time to select a renewal term. Easily add additional years to the default (lowest) number of years by using the drop-down list. Most top-level domains (.com and .net, for example) can be renewed for up to a maximum of 10 years. Click ‘Continue’ when finished.
5. Select ‘Check out with credit card’ or ‘Check out with PayPal’ to choose your preferred payment method. If you select PayPal, you will be presented with a pop-up window from PayPal to sign in and verify the payment. We have more details on the PayPal process here.
6. Once payment is complete, a final confirmation page will be displayed. Click “I have read and agree to the Hover terms of service” and click ‘Finish’ to finalize the transaction.

If you have more than one domain…

1. Sign in to your Hover account
2. Check the box next to the domains you want to renew.
3. Select the ‘Renew’ option from the drop-down list, and then click on ‘Bulk Edit’ to begin the renewal process.

No Hassle Renewals!

Hover’s ‘No Hassle’ Renewal feature allows you to renew any domain or email address without having to log in. This is a great option if you want to renew for a friend or family, or if you forgot your login information and need to renew right away.

1. Load https://www.hover.com/renew in your web browser.
Enter the domain name or personal email address you wish to renew in the text box. You can also enter multiple domains separated by a space. Click ‘Check Domain’.
2. Select the number of years you wish to renew the domain for from the drop-down menu under the Term heading. Then click ‘+’ to add the renewal to your shopping cart.
3. When you’ve finished adding items to your shopping cart, click ‘Checkout’.

If you need any assistance renewing your domain, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 1-866-731-6556 or send us an email at help@hover.com.

Back in July we announced some exciting updates to Hover Webmail. Here are three features of Webmail we think you’ll love:

Refreshed look and feel

If you’ve previewed the updated version of webmail, the overall look and feel is probably what you noticed first. Aside from the noticeably cleaner, sleeker look of the interface, we’ve changed things up a bit to be more organized than ever. You’ll see easy-to navigate tabs and a far more readable interface. The address book has gotten a makeover, featuring a new three-pane layout. We’ve also added a usage bar which, as you might imagine, shows how much storage space you’ve used up. Have a look at the screenshot below, we think you’ll like what you see :-)

Improved browser support

With added support for Chrome and Safari 4, use your favorite browser without compromising your email experience. These browsers are supported in both the Standard and Basic interfaces. If you’re experiencing any difficulties with your webmail, make sure you have the latest version of your preferred browser or give us a call at 1-866-731-6556 Monday to Friday from 8AM to 8PM EST.

Overall speed and responsiveness

Speed is important. The new updated webmail features email-wide improvements to response time by reducing the size of the Javascript modules of the web app.

To start using the updated version of webmail, select the ‘Preview’ option when logging in to your account. You still have the option to switch back to the older version of webmail if you so desire.

If you’ve already been using the new Webmail preview, let us know what you think at help@hover.com – we’d love to hear your thoughts!

At Hover, we appreciate when you spread the word about our domain name and email services to your friends. We want to reward you for your loyalty with the Hover Refer a Friend program. Simply by referring Hover to one of your friends, get a $2 credit applied to your account!

Here’s how it works:

1. Refer one of your friends (or family members, or coworkers) to Hover with your unique referral code.
2. They make a purchase on Hover.com.
3. You both get a credit of $2 added to your account.
4. Your credit will automatically be applied to your next purchase or renewal.

To locate your referral code, sign in to your Hover account > click the My Account tab > Settings > then select ‘click here to refer your friends to Hover’. You can copy and paste your referral link into an email, blog or webpage! You can even Tweet and post your code to Facebook directly from the Hover site.

So go ahead and spread some Hover love. The more you spread the word about Hover, the more you (and your friends!) get rewarded. Its a win-win and if you count us into the equation, it’s a near impossible win-win-win trifecta. Go to your account page now and spread the Hover love.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by long, arduous shopping cart experiences, this post is for you.

At Hover we’re proud of our clean, simple interface that makes getting the perfect domain as painless as possible. We’ve extended that ethos to our online checkout. Some of you may have noticed a brand new shopping cart when purchasing, renewing or canceling a domain. Whether you’re completing any of the aforementioned transactions, we’ve made it easier and faster than ever before. Here are some great new features of the Hover shopping cart:

Total Consolidation

Have a domain to register and another to renew? You can do both on our consolidated interface which allows you to make multiple transactions on the same page. You can even add a promotional code or discount code directly into the shopping cart and your discount will be automatically applied.

Cleaner breakdown

The new mouseover feature allows you to view all items in your cart without clutter.

No upsell

The price you see is the price you pay. Hover customers don’t pay extra for Whois privacy or other add-ons that other domain name registrars charge for.

Fewer clicks

Our consolidated shopping cart makes your checkout experience as friction-free as possible with fewer clicks required to complete common tasks.

Want to see the shopping cart in action? Head over to Hover.com.

As always, feel free to contact our Customer Support Center at 1-866-731-6556 (8am – 8pm EST M-F) or by email at help@hover.com.

If you’ve ever owned a mailbox before you’re probably all too familiar with spam. And no, I am not referring to the (questionably) edible variety. Rather, spam is unsolicited email that has been sent indiscriminately to multiple recipients. Spam can range from mail from legitimate companies to malicious mail containing viruses. You may have heard in the news recently of ‘phishing’ scams from senders who appear to be banks asking for your account information and ultimately stealing your money or identity (or both!).

Dealing with spam is an ongoing challenge. We get billions of individual pieces of mail going through our servers each year that classify as spam. The vast majority of them we cut off at the pass. However, spammers are always working to sneak through the nets and despite everyone’s best efforts, sometimes they will succeed.

There are ways to eliminate spam in your inbox. Should to occasional piece slip through, there are also ways to avoid falling victim.

Unsubscribe

In most countries, spammers are required to abide by the same laws as telemarketers. What that means is if you click ‘unsubscribe’ to a solicitors email, they are required by law to stop all communication with you. This advice has been contested with the argument that if you hit unsubscribe then the spammer will know yours is an active email address and may spam you more. The key here is to be cautious. If you don’t recognize the sender, use Google to search for more information to confirm whether the bulk email is coming from a legitimate company. Legitimate companies should take their privacy policy and your mailing preferences seriously where spam farms won’t.

Never reply

The title speaks for itself. Never, ever reply to a spam message. If you can tell that a message is spam in your inbox folder, delete it rather than opening it. Spam subject lines notoriously contain attention-grabbing words and punctuation in order to get you to open.

Use an alternate address

Only give your personal address to family, friends and other trusted contacts. If you need to register for mailing lists, enter a contest, purchase things online, etc., a free Gmail, Yahoo! or Outlook account is a great way to route potential spammers away from your main mailbox.

Mark junk as spam

Hover webmail uses a powerful but simple spam tool – the Spam button. If you select a spam email in your Inbox and click on the Spam button, it will send us a detailed report of the message you received. This information is used to improve and test updates to our spam filtering software.

The one thing to remember when dealing with unsolicited mail is to not open mail from a sender you don’t recognize. Use anti-virus software to help protect you from email viruses and always be alert to phishing scams. As always, be very cautious of the personal information you share online; don’t post your email address in forums or on Facebook, for example.

Both as a user and a provider of Internet services, I find myself talking often lately about the big ecosystems (Apple, Google, Facebook) versus little “best of breed” solutions.

The comparison is pretty simple.

With the big ecosystems, you get simplicity and harmony. You buy into one all-in-one solution. Everything syncs together beautifully. And, generally, because the companies who have ascended to the ecosystem level are pretty smart, everything is pretty good.

With little best of breed solutions, you get just that. Somebody has focused on solving one problem or doing one thing better. You take a chance on a less familiar provider. You possibly endure a bit of pain to make it work with the rest of your stuff (sometimes because the ecosystems want it to be a bit painful). But very often you get some hard-earned awesomeness.

It’s certainly not a new conversation. We confronted this with Microsoft on the desktop many years ago. (The smart kids knew that there were better spreadsheet and word processing documents. I actually didn’t.) We’re even essentially talking about the same sort of thing when we compare Walmart to the “mom and pop” shops.

Sometimes there’s a price thing going on. The ecosystems have scale. They also tend to have alternate revenue streams. They give you this for free so they can make money on that. So, sometimes big means cheap or free and little means paid. But that’s not consistent across services. There are a lot of paid services from the big guys and a lot of free services from the little guys.

It really does come back to harmony and a guaranteed level of quality versus focus and the potential for awesomeness.

Now, as a user, I go back and forth. I’m not really an anti-establishment sort of guy. I bought heavily into Apple for my music and video world about 5 years ago and have gotten a lot of joy watching my media bounce effortlessly from cloud to laptop to flat screen TV. Likewise, I use an Android smartphone and I have discovered tremendous value in running more and more of my life (contacts, mail, calendar) through Google.

But quite often, I have an itch that these guys can’t scratch. And I have to admit I get more than just satisfaction when I find someone who can. I get some sort of thrill that genius is everywhere. (You know what this is like for me? It’s sort of like when some kid who went unnoticed by every major NCAA basketball program comes into Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke and lights us up for 30+. I love it.) Nobody will ever be the best at everything. Insight, necessity and focus will always breed worthy competitors.

Evernote gives me stuff I couldn’t find in any of the task features of the major mail programs. Google Maps is wonderful but it doesn’t quite give me what a Runkeeper or MapMyRide does. Rdio finally pried me away from iTunes. Someone here at Tucows pointed me to IFTTT the other day. Brilliant. It gave me exactly what I needed. One dashboard where I could trigger email alerts from tons of different social media.

Ah, so sometimes we also need little guys to help build bridges between the ecosystems.

That’s where I think we’ve landed on Hover. If I was forced to pick one, I’d say Hover is invested in the best of breed world. And I’ll admit that, as an organization, we tend to love discovering and celebrating those lesser known geniuses. (I think we fell in love wth Sparrow long before Google did. We just didn’t have the cash.) But we also devote pages of tutorials and hours on the phone every day to helping people use their Hover email address with their Gmail. We basically want to foster a world where Internet users get to choose what’s best for them. We have talked about our mission to reduce friction in our own customer experience. That’s exactly what we want to do across the Internet. Specifically, we want to provide an important piece of your web presence and then do everything we possibly can to help you use it with any other pieces you choose, inside or outside of the big ecosystems.

(By the way, Hover is also one of those little best of breed solutions. You can likely manage your domain name with the same service that you use to build and host your website and get half a dozen other related services. But you will not get the same sort of experience you get with someone who lives and breathes domain names like we do.)

So, my advice is this. Enjoy that feeling of harmony you get floating around your chosen ecosystem. Keep an eye out for folks that might be doing one thing even better. And please come to us if we can help you figure out how to make it all work together.

Oh, and if anyone feels like contributing, I’d love more examples of best of breed solutions that solved a problem the big guys just weren’t solving for you. Thanks.

Do you own 25 domains? 50? 100? Manage them all without hassle with Hover Bulk Domain Management tools.

We understand that you’re likely to have more than one domain, and you want to be able to manage them all in one central space. With Hover, it’s as easy to manage 50 domains as it is two.

Allowing you to change multiple domains at once, Hover saves you time and takes all the hard work out of managing multiple domain names. With Hover Bulk Domain Management tools, you can turn on domain privacy, renew your domains, cancel domains, edit contact information, locate registry records and much more.

Manage Contacts

Contact management for multiple domains helps you easily change contact details at once. Easily handle different domain contacts including registrant, administrator, etc.

Domain Renewal/Cancellation

Rather than manually renewing each of your domains separately, Hover makes renewal simple as it was to register. Simply go to your account, select all domains you’d like to renew, click Renew from the drop-down menu, and select Bulk Edit.

Domain Privacy

If you’d like to turn the privacy settings on your domains on/off, simply select all domains you’d like to change, click Domain Privacy, select Bulk Edit, then select either On or Off under the Domain Privacy heading and hit Save.

With Hover, managing multiple domains is easy, whether you have five domains or 500. Head over to Hover.com/signin to bulk manage your domains.
Still considering registering with Hover? Learn more about the domains we offer here.

Need Help?

We’ve all been there. Whether you have technical problems or a question about your account, sometimes you just need answers. That’s where we come in. Hover’s fast, reliable and empowered customer service team is available when you need them to answer any questions you may have about our service. Hover makes it easy, with a multitude of places to go to get what you’re looking for:

Online

Got a question? Start with the Hover Knowledge Base. Our Knowledge Base is filled with how-to’s and answers to common questions. Moreover, our Community Forums act as an open community where Hover users can ask questions, help each other out and submit feature requests. You can also stay up to date with our Announcements section of the Help Center.

Email

Can’t find your answer online? Have a quick question? The Hover Customer Support team will be happy to help. Drop us a line at help@hover.com – we’re available to answer your questions from Monday to Friday from 8am until 8pm (ET).

Telephone

Automated systems are annoying and frankly, we think more highly of you than to submit you to call center purgatory. With Hover, you’ll hear a real live voice on the other end of the phone when you call, not “Press 1 for Account Changes” or anything like that. To hear what customer service is supposed to sound like, give us a call at 1-866-731-6556 Monday to Friday, anytime between 8am to 8pm (ET).

Keep up to date with the latest news, announcements and join in on the conversation – follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

We at Hover love Squarespace. We’ve spoken before about Squarespace’s customizable templates and easy-to-use interfaces (not to mention reliable, 24/7 customer service!). Have a look at this post on the Hover blog for some of favorite Squarespace sites and how to use your domain creatively.
That’s why we’re excited about the launch of Squarespace 6. If you love Squarespace as much as we do, have a look at some of the newest features that’ll take your website to the next level:

Introducing LayoutEngine

A new page builder from Squarespace, LayoutEngine gives you the freedom to create visually rich pages. All of your content is laid out on a perfect but flexible grid, so it takes the guesswork out of getting everything to line up.

State-of-the-Art Photo Galleries

Squarespace 6 features photo galleries with next-generation features to easily upload and edit images. Uploading is made easy by simply dragging and dropping your files straight from your desktop into Squarespace in your browser.

Blogging, simplified

Creating and uploading content for your blog is effortless with the Squarespace Page Builder and gallery system. We love the bookmarklet tool for reblogging from anywhere on the web!

Controlled collaboration

With Squarespace 6 you have the control to invite contributors to help you manage your website. It allows you to set individual permissions, from full admin to a trusted commenter, so you’re always in control of who can comment on and edit your content.

Be mobile-ready

Sure, your site looks great on a computer screen, but what about mobile? It’s not surprising that the number of mobile devices is set to exceed the world’s population in the near future. From 2011 the average smartphone usage nearly tripled, up from 55 MB/month last year to 150 MB/month in 2012. With each and every Squarespace template comes a unique mobile design so your work can shine on mobile platforms.

Try Squarespace 6, it’s free!

Head over to www.Squarespace.com for your free 14-day trial. After that, it’s just $8/month for a great looking website.

Want to learn how to point your domain to your Squarespace site? Simply follow the steps below:

If you’d like to create a domain forward from your Hover domain so that the url will look like this: www.yourdomain.com/blog, simply follow these steps:

1. Log into your Hover account.
2. Click on the domain you want to redirect
3. Go to forwards
4. Click +Add new
5. Enter a shortcut name and click “Mask This”
6. Enter the url and click Save

To create a subdomain forward to your Squarespace site (blog.yourdomain.com) follow these steps:
Log into your Hover account.

1. Click on the domain you want to redirect
2. Go to forwards
3. Click +Add new
4. Enter a shortcut name and click “Mask This”
5. click the make this a subdomain button
6. Enter the url of your Shopify store and click Save

If your Squarespace site is your only website, a complete domain redirect is your best option:

1. Log into your Hover account.
2. Click on the domain you want to redirect
3. Check your domain’s nameservers. If the nameservers are ns1.hover.com and ns2.hover.com, then you can skip to the next step. If your name servers are not set to Hover, click on the Edit button and change your name servers to ns1.hover.com and ns2.hover.com.
4. Click on the DNS tab. Double check that your domain name’s A records are pointed at 64.99.80.30..
5. Click on the Domain Details tab and then click on Edit in the Forward This Domain section.
6. Select Yes to enable forwarding and then type the destination address in the “Forward to” text field

As usual, Hover domains start at just $15/year. A full list of all available domains can be found at www.Hover.com/pricing